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Full-Text Articles in Labor Relations

Ethnic Democracy And Its Ambiguities: The Case Of The Needle Trade Unions, Gerd Korman May 2008

Ethnic Democracy And Its Ambiguities: The Case Of The Needle Trade Unions, Gerd Korman

Gerd Korman

[Excerpt] During the years between World War I and World War II the conduct among well-known Jewish labor leaders seems to have foreshadowed events in the history of America’s nationality following the tumult of the 1960’s. In the 1920’s and 1930’s America’s elected or appointed officials still used a pecking order based on assumed inequalities of race, ethnicity, and gender in making policy decisions. They presumed that their private interests, those of the “insiders,” the “leading groups,” or “controlling minorities,” were the only appropriate ones for determining public policy. It was then, especially in the Depression years, when the New …


Silence In America Textbooks, Gerd Korman May 2008

Silence In America Textbooks, Gerd Korman

Gerd Korman

[Excerpt] Although more than two decades separate us from the time when the Allied forces revealed the depth and dimensions of the Nazi horror, America’s textbook-writing historians still do not understand the demands the death camps place on each of them as scholar and as educator of the young in our public schools and universities. They continue to write in the tradition that prepared no one for the catastrophe, a tradition that still prevents us from attempting to assess and understand what happened; for with precious few exceptions they write of the years before 1945 as if the 1930’s and …


Bottom-Up Organizing In The Trades: An Interview With Mike Lucas, Ibew Director Of Organizing, Jeff Grabelsky Jan 2008

Bottom-Up Organizing In The Trades: An Interview With Mike Lucas, Ibew Director Of Organizing, Jeff Grabelsky

Jeffrey Grabelsky

[Excerpt] Like the bottom-up organizers who built the IBEW 100 years ago by traveling from city to city, working at their trade and preaching the union creed, Lucas has been around the block. From Florida to Oklahoma, Indiana to Tennessee, he worked from 1954 to 1959 as a member of the Laborers and Teamsters unions. He began his organizing career in the utility construction industry, and first volunteered his talents to the IBEW in 1960 by organizing the manufacturing workers at a new Studebaker plant in Bloomington, Indiana, which he had recently helped build as a union electrician. He served …